I've spent a lot of time looking into this. We are always open to new information and when we find evidence of abuse, we ban accounts and then some. We have low tolerance for actual abuse on HN.
But I can tell you with confidence that most people accusing "paid propagandists" are simply imagining the nastiest about those who happen to disagree with them. Both sides do this on divisive issues. That's not acceptable either.
That’s not a rip on you, the previous poster, or anyone. It’s just a statement that, yeah, sometimes it is important to highlight a poster’s potential bias. Why would you not want to?
Also, I’m curious: what technologies do you guys use to identify bad actors? Maybe if I understood the sophistication of your methods, I would have more trust. There are a lot of smart people here (much smarter than me) who may want to help.
"Sometimes it's important to highlight a poster's potential bias" is covered by the site guideline that asks you to send such concerns to [email protected] rather than posting them in the threads. In the vast majority of cases that I see, it's not hard to establish that the accusation of shillage is wrong and that the user was just expressing their personal view—unless you think the Chinese government planted people on HN years ago to establish posting histories about Julia or whatever.
Legit HN users have a right not to be dressed down or have their histories hauled out by a flash mob that doesn't like what they said. If you're concerned that someone is breaking the site guidelines or otherwise abusing HN, please contact us privately.
At worse you could argue that the poster is biased, but then in this types of geopolitical discussions who isn't? Certainly not me.
Yet sometimes it leads to a better outcome than just analysis of the argument alone. Context is real. Context matters. Automatically disregarding real information on the grounds of "maturity" ideology can lead to a worse outcome, so it doesn't seem like the best course.